Olympics: New Political Football

With 197 countries participating and perhaps as many as 100 heads of state attending, the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games will be one of the most widely watched events of all time.

Massive television coverage will mean that much of America and the rest of the world will be watching on July 20 when President Clinton says, “Let the Games begin,” at opening ceremonies. In many other ways, Clinton will reap a rich harvest of publicity from the Games.

For the president and his reelection campaign, the Games will be a political bonanza, perhaps even greater than that enjoyed by President Reagan when the Olympics took place in Los Angeles in 1984 during his reelection campaign. And some Republicans are raising questions about the expenditure of taxpayer funds for the Olympics and are grumbling that the White House is plotting to exploit the Games for political advantage.

Administration officials insist that nothing will be done to inject politics into the Games. In fact, said Ron Klain, chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, Clinton’s participation will be “fairly consistent” with what Reagan did in 1984.

Reagan reveled in the Olympics. In addition to opening the ceremonies in Los Angeles, he addressed the athletes at the Olympic Village, attended several events, worked the Games and their rallying cries into numerous speeches and statements, conducted a torch ceremony at the White House and hosted a dinner after the competition for U.S. Olympic athletes.

Clinton’s plans are no less ambitious for the Atlanta Games, which will be more than twice as large as the Los Angeles Olympics and, according to Gore, will be like conducting “the equivalent of six Super Bowls simultaneously every day for 17 days.”

Clinton and his family, as well as Gore and his family, plan to attend several Olympic events. The Games will run through Aug. 4.

The White House has been heavily involved in planning for the Olympics since early in the administration. In fact, the Bush White House began participating in planning soon after Atlanta’s selection as the Olympics site in September 1990. And in September 1992, when Bush was campaigning for reelection, he attended an event marking the arrival of the Olympic flag in Atlanta.

Gore, who has been conducting weekly meetings of a White House Task Force on the Olympics that he chairs, estimates he has attended “at least a hundred meetings about different aspects” of the Games. The president also has taken a keen personal interest in the Olympics and has attended a number of the meetings.

But Gore said that only two of the meetings have involved press coverage. The rest, he said, have been conducted out of the limelight as part of the host nation’s responsibility for logistics and other arrangements, especially keeping the risk of terrorism at a minimum.

Safely and adequately hosting something as massive as the Atlanta Olympics, Gore said, “can’t be done without smooth, strong, well-integrated activities on the part of agencies of the federal government, not to mention members of the Atlanta Committee on the Olympics Games, and Atlanta and Georgia officials.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), an advisor to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. Bob Dole, has said that he has no objection to the $63 million in federal funds being spent to prevent terrorism at the Games, but he has raised questions about $150 million in federal aid for transportation and other expenses not directly related to security matters.

Another advisor to Dole said: “At some point, questions about the use of taxpayer dollars for travel and other Olympics activities may be raised.” But the advisor, a former Bush administration official who declined to be identified, acknowledged that “politically, it’s going to be hard to counter what Clinton does because taking part in the Olympics is such an American thing.”

Administration officials defended the expenditure of government funds as minimal and consistent with the responsibilities of a host nation. Olympics Co-Chairman Andrew Young said that Republicans, instead of complaining, should be hailing the mostly privately financed $1.6-billion Olympics as “a triumph of free enterprise, something Peter [V.] Ueberroth demonstrated at the Los Angeles Olympics.”

Young, a former Democratic congressman who served as ambassador to the United Nations in the Carter administration, stressed that the Olympics will be nonpartisan and said he hopes that Dole will attend some of the Games.

The Olympic torch arrives in Washington on June 20 and will go directly to Capitol Hill for ceremonies. That evening, it will be taken to the White House. The next day, in time for the morning television shows, Clinton will participate in a torch ceremony at the White House.

On Aug. 16, Clinton will return to Atlanta to attend the opening of the Paralympics for handicapped athletes.

Other events also are being planned, including a White House dinner honoring U.S. Olympics and Paralympics athletes after the conclusion of the Paralympics.

Clinton already has managed to work the Olympics into a number of his speeches and statements and undoubtedly will do it many more times between now and the November election. But he may be hard pressed to outshine Reagan in that respect.

Reagan repeatedly identified himself with the “new patriotism” associated with the Los Angeles Games, turned his rallies into celebrations of the Olympics and peppered his speeches and statements with such comments as “go for the gold” and “shoot for the stars like our Olympic athletes.”

At the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Reagan declared: “Let’s take our cue from our Olympic athletes” and “let’s go for the gold.” And delegates chanted “U.S.A., U.S.A.” as American Olympic athletes were paraded before them.